Tuesday, May 23, 2017

Great minds

It seems to me as though more and more web sites are demanding that you “sign up” for their spam emails before they’ll deliver content. This includes before you’ve seen enough of their content to want to even scroll down the landing page, much less clog your inbox with their crap.

I personally think it’s pretty nervy on their part. Often that’s enough to get me to click away from their site, but occasionally I’ll try to evade their little popup. My automatic go-to is to close the box, either by choosing “No, thanks, I prefer to struggle on without benefit of your super-duper goods or information” or by clicking the close X. Sometimes just clicking outside of the popup will make it go away, but increasingly these people are jigging it so the only way you can get around it is to “sign up” for their emails.

In the rare case that I decide I really want to see something, I’ll use a bogus email address, usually a rude word or anatomical irregularity with a generic domain. If they’ve set it up so that you have to confirm the address by replying to an email from them, then I’m stuffed. But if not, then I get what I want and get out.

Well, obviously I’m not the only person to have thought of this work-around. Yesterday I arrived at Wayfair.com via a tweet. They demanded an address to send their emails to. I typed in pissoff@yahoo.com and hit enter. And got this response:


Bwahahaha!




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